A story, moving from Haiti to Brooklyn to Miami, of a woman whose sense of self and family are called into question when she gets caught in a random act of violence one sunny Florida day.
Heartfelt ... The novelist’s duty is to present such questions and then leave the room — to grant the reader space to ponder them. Danticat does this masterfully, particularly regarding the subjects of love and home ... Despite its title — the Kreyòl word for mourning — there is hope, however faint, in this tender novel.
A gracious exercise in restraint, a story fueled by the tempered outrage that runs through so much of her fiction and nonfiction. She bears witness and, by the extraordinary empathy of her prose, makes us witnesses, too ... A haunting feat of concision and elision ... In the quiet sanctuary of Danticat’s prose, the complexity of Magnolia’s life gently unfurls ... But this is determinedly not a thriller about mass shootings, details of which are laced so sparingly through these pages that you’ll taste the poison without being sickened by it. This is, instead, very much a novel about persisting, about remaining alive in a world that would have us be ghosts
A masterful short story writer, Danticat has employed the novel-in-stories format to tremendous effect in The Dew Breaker (2004) and Claire of the Sea Light (2013). Dèy offers an inversion: the novel’s social sweep and focal intensity on the protagonist’s emotional and psychological undulations paired with the short story’s compressed clock ... The novel is a defense strategy and living elegy.
